Ryan is in!

It was an unbelievable day! Awesome in every way. 
We woke up to perfect blue skies and made our way up to Cypress Mountian for the qualification event for men's aerials. It's a two-jump event where the scores for both jumps are added together and the top 12 copetitors out of the field of 25 are invited back to compete in finals (an Olympic medal event) on Thursday.
Ryan finished the qualification event in 2nd place - a great confidence booster as he refocuses for his next event.
I don't have the photos to post but I promise to have them up as soon as possible - more in my next post but here's some news links...
USA Today
LA Times Olympic Blog
Getty Images

Men's Aerials tomorrow!

Getting psyched!  The family has arrived and the St.Onge / Vancouver base camp has multiplied in numbers.  All the best to Ryan - cross your fingers and toes and send him good vibes and wishes on the day!

Hockey - USA vs Canada

The press and the hype just bit Canada in the backside again!  Or maybe it's just Ryan Miller standing on his head in goal making 42 saves on the night.  USA triumphs 5-2 before a sea of red. 
I think most of the city, and probably the country, is still in shock. Coca cola has been running a series of ads featuring hockey scenes and sums up the ad with "let's show the world just who's game this is".  Well I didn't get down town after the game tonight but I have heard it's very quiet down there. 
Canada is by no means out of this tournament and they'll be back in force to play the boys from the US another night.  Let's just hope Ryan Miller is on again the way he was tonight.
What a night in Vancouver and what a night for hockey - I can't wait to read the papers tomorrow! 

Congratulations Ashley!

Our good friend Ashley Caldwell landed two good jumps today and earned the right to come back Wednesday night and compete for medals with the top twelve female aerialists in the world.
What makes this so incredibly great is that Ashley is just 16 years old and as such is the yougest jumper in the finals by far. She was recruited out of her elite gymnastics program to live, school, and train in Lake Placid NY as part of a brand new freestyle skiing development program. She's been training hard for several years and earned the right to represent the USA at the Olympics earlier than anyone could have predicted.
She certainly made it interesting today for all those cheering for her. The suspense built throughout the event and it was not until the last competitor was scored that we all learned she had made the cut for finals.
Ashley was trailed after the event by the media and autograph seekers. Enjoy it kid and we wish you all the best in the finals!

Womens Aerial Qualifications...

Today is the first of the Freestyle Aerial events.  The women go first and a field of 23 competitors will be cut to 12.  The foramt for the Olympics in Aerials is a two-jump qualification (today) with the top 12 coming back to compete this Wednesday in a two-jump final. These are treated as separate events in that the scores from the qualification round are used to gain entry into the final but are not carried forward into the final.
We had an insanely beautiful day for this event. If you were here or if you caught it Live on NBC you were witness to the incredible blue sky of western Canada.

Winning team...

Two events completed and a little celebration is in order!

The results team jumped up on the Olympic podium following the sucessful production of both the women's and men's mogul events. 

From left to right: Lee, Jason, Ian, Vern, and David.

Men's Moguls

The rain stopped and it's hard to believe this is the same hill the women competed on just yesterday.  Although the course was still slow and slushy, clearing skies, and even a bit of sun, greeted the men's moguls athletes and spectators on competition day. Canada was still looking to Freestyle to provide it's first gold medal on home turf. Perhaps 24 hours later than expected, Alexandre Bilodeau delivered. Dale Begg-Smith was smooth and flawless as ever but perhaps didn't put it all out there in terms of speed and difficulty in the air. Bryon Wilson grabbed the bronze for the US throwing a beautiful back-double-full (the same jump Bilodeau performed) on the top air bump.

Women's Moguls

Women.s moguls went off in the rain as scheduled amidst concerns we woould lose visabilty at the top of the course to a degree where the judges could not see well enough to do their thing.
Moguls is a timed and judged event.  The basic assumption is that it's harder to ski moguls well fast than it is slow.  I can attest to this.  The faster you ski the more "time points" you're gonna get.  The better you carve your turns and absorb the terrain, the better "turns" scores you're gonna get. Assuming you're in good shape so far, you need to launch yourself into the air (usually upside down) at twice during your decsent.  The two jumps are scored and multiplied by a "difficulty" factor.  Combine all these numbers in a weighted formula for a tootal score.  For a detailed eplaination of mogul scoring see: http://wiki.fisski.com/index.php/Mogul_Judging_And_Scoring
The event didn't finish up exactly how the Canadian media had planned.  Since Hannah Kearney qualified with the highest score in the qualification round, she had the honor of running last in the final round, giving her the opportunity to one-up all previous competitors.  Hannah did just that scoring 26.63 points and earning the first US gold medal of these Olympics. Canada's 2006 Olympic champion Jennifer Heil tok silver with  25.69 points and Shannon Bahrke of the United States took bronze with 25.43 points.  Go USA!

Mogul media madness...

Held on the day following opening ceremonies, women's moguls is one of the first medal events of these winter games.  The Canadian media has been ridiculous in my mind about putting pressure on their athletes and this event was hyped beyond belief. Most of the pressure comes from the fact that Canada, although hosting the Olympics twice before (Calgary and Montreal) has not collected a Gold medal on it's own turf.
The media was running out of behind-the-scenes type stories about venue prepartion and lack of snow, had done all they could with the opening ceromonies, and was now chomping at the bit for a story related to an actual event.  With 2006 gold medalist Jennifer Heil competing in moguls, predictions were made, pressure was applied and the media showed up in force.

Opening ceromonies...

I didn't go.  I watched it on a big screen during dinner. 

It was pouring rain and a damned good thing the event was held entirely indoors.  I suppose if you were watching you might not guess - with a snowboarder dropping in and all the snow falling on the dancers. I watched closely to pick out my friends on the US teams but CTV panned the athletes from the Ukraine, zoomed in on Shaun White, and then moved right on to Uzbekistan.  And I thought NBC coverage was slanted?
The town was going off.  The city has closed off streets and tried to encourage partying in just a few areas to keep it contained and holy crap - I guess it worked.  Robson street and Yaletown were just slammed. Go Canada!

Athletes on the hill...

The athletes have been rolling in and training moguls. There's an old adage that says you've gotta train in the conditions in which you will compete and since rain is expected for competition day, everyone is out on the hill in the pouring rain.  It's just nasty out and I have no idea how these guys and girls can see a thing while skiing mach 3 in a downpour.

The flame comes to town...

The Olympic torch traveled across all of Canada and timed the 106 day trip to wrap up in Vancouver for the opening ceromonies.  Yup that's a torch!

Behind the scenes...

I'm part of the OVR (On Venue Results) team.  Yeah, we have more acronyms than do most software companies. There are five of us that operate the scoring systems.  SQL servers to store and manage all data, keypads the collect input from the judges, systems to receive the scores from the keypads, timing systems to receive input from on hill timing equipment, scoring machines to combine all the data received, apply rules and calulate total scores and ranking, and interface systems to comunicate all the reults out to the local scoreboard, the local commentator displayes, the internatinal TV feed, and NBC TV.  The product of al this is easily seen on TV when you watch one of our events.  The athlete starts skiing down the hill and you see a small box on screen showing the running time (how long he/she has been on course), when they cross the finish line the timer stops.  Once the judges punch in there scores (while replays are shown on TV), the athlete looks beyond the camera aat the score board and simultaneously the scores are pushed to the scoreboard, merged with TV graphics and displayed across the bottom of your screen.  This enables the TV cameras to capture the athlete's reaction to their score and the crowd's reaction at the venue in the same moment.  Drama baby!   

Preparations...

While the hill crews are working hard building courses, we get busy setting up anad testing oour timing anad scoring gear.  Our results team is made up of five and our timing team made up of about eight more.  Add in several volunteers and a few Vanoc (Vancover Olympic Comittee) employees and that's what it takes to pull the scores down from the judges, combine them with the numbers from the Omega photocells on the hill, caculate the athletes score and communicate it to the world.  It doesn't seem all that hard but when you consider there are gold medals on the line things get a bit more complicated.  First of all there is redundant everything, failover everything and overkill everywhere.  We just gotta get it right!

Helicopters bringing in the snow...

Helicopters like this one are flying around the clock to bring in snow from surrounding peaks at higher elevations.  The snow is delivered very precisely to the Freestyle courses then moved and smoothed by snow cats.
We met the pilot and crew of "Lucille" and they gave us a tour of this beast.  There are some fewer than 20 of these in the world and as you can imagine it costs big bucks (something like $10k per hour) to operate them.
One of the big stories around the Olympics here in Vancouver is the amount of money being spent to make up for Mother Nature's lack of enthusiasm.  Imagine your tax money going into moving piles of snow that will literally melt away over the next few weeks!

The Aerials course

The bottom of the Aerials hill is coming together!  Still lot's of heavy equqipment on site to move snow from dump trucks onto the course.

Earth movers...

Our first day up on the mountain was pretty telling of all the work that’s been going on to create ski and snowboard event hills without the help of mother nature. Cypress ski area is only 20 minutes and 900 feet of elevation above the city and apparently they are setting all kinds of records for high temperatures in Vancouver this year with hardly any snow at the lower elevations. The Olympics are often called the “O” show by the folks attached to the games and the “O” show must go on. The solution – trucking snow in from other locations and moving it up onto the hill with helicopters and earth movers. Trucks have been running snow up the access road bumper to bumper for weeks now and the hills are starting to turn white and take shape.

Clean getaway...

As hard as I try to get away clean on a trip like this, it never seems to go as well as I plan. There are always things on your to-do list that you plan to do tomorrow and this system works fine right up until the day before you travel.  That's when today’s list and tomorrow’s become one. So in order to get out clean, I worked to an embarrassingly late hour Monday night and put myself in the hole on sleep right out of the gate.